Explosives considered at WTC site

Duh...a no brainer, it would seem.

City commissioner says he rejected proposal to blow up remains of
towers
By KAREN MATTHEWS
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - The head of the city Department of Design and
Construction said Tuesday that he rejected a proposal from Army
explosives experts to blow up the ruins of the World Trade Center
towers that stood for weeks after the terrorist attacks.
"They basically wanted to put explosives around the base of the
facades," Commissioner Kenneth Holden told a conference at a
midtown hotel.
"We nixed that idea, feeling that a large explosion in lower
Manhattan would result in a large number of heart attacks, and we
basically ended up ... hanging ironworkers from cranes and cutting
them down almost like you'd cut down a piece of a tree, and then
pulling down the pieces one by one," Holden said.
Holden, who is in charge of the nearly completed task of
clearing debris from the trade center site, spoke on the second day
of the "Looking Back, Moving Forward" conference on lessons
learned after Sept. 11.
The cleanup operation will officially end on May 30 with a
ceremony featuring an empty stretcher symbolizing the human remains
not recovered from the site.
Nearly 19,500 body parts have been recovered and more than 1,000
victims have been identified, about 300 through DNA alone.
But Holden said the operation "was much more than just
statistics or numbers."
He recalled one day when a firefighter intervened as workers
were building roads to allow trucks to gain closer access to the
debris.
"He said, 'You've already built a road over one of my friends
and now the road that you're building in front of the south tower
is the area where I believe my son is,"' Holden said.
The firefighter asked for four or five hours to look for his
son's remains.
Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Tom Ridge, head of the federal
Office of Homeland Security, are to address the conference on
Wednesday.